WILSON TUCKER – Tomorrow Plus X. Avon T168, paperback, 1957. Cover by Richard Powers. Originally published as Time Bomb (Rinehart, hardcover, 1955).

   A detective story complicated by future developments if telepathy and time-travel. Lieutenant Danforth of the Illinois Security Police is assigned the task of solving several bombings directed at the fanatic Sons of America. The one responsible is from the future, determined to stop Ben’s Boys from taking over America under their dictatorship.

   The attempt to successfully portray this future society, undergoing severe technological upheavals, does not entirely come off. It cannot really escape the appearances of America ten years ago with a few new gadgets thrown in, but this may be caused chiefly by hindsight. Twice, in Chapters 1 and 6, the action seems to stumble badly, but this may have been intended, for later (p.155) Tucker makes a weak attempt to justify the points in question.

Rating: 3 stars.

BURKE WILKINSON – The Adventures of Geoffrey Mildmay, V.C.: A Trilogy. Robert B. Luce, hardcover, 1977. Consisting of: (1) Proceed at Will (Little Brown, hardcover, 1948); (2) Run, Mongoose (Little Brown, hardcover, 1950; Permabook, paperback, as Black Judas); and Last Clear Chance (Little Brown, hardcover, 1954).

   Proceed at Will, the first adventure of Geoffrey Mildmay begins with that Stevensonian announcement about the nature of heroism. The war is over and American officer Bill Stacy is seconded to Admiralty intelligence to go to France and find his friend Commander Geoffrey Mildmay who disappeared after being sent to sink the German battleship Prinz von Blucher in Brittany.

   Bill is Mildmay’s closest friend, and enemy, because as the novel describes their friendship is fraught with Mildmay’s mercurial nature. His courage is never in question, but his loyalty is another matter.

   During the war Bill had been chosen to work on a British project to train Mildmay to pilot a midget sub and sink the von Blucher. Intelligence was concerned about Mildmay’s ties to a group who had questionable loyalty and his nature made those questions vital to answer.

   As always with the man, nothing is ever simple black and white. When Bill helps uncover a fifth columnist plot Mildmay claims he was working with British intelligence all along, and Bill can’t be sure he isn’t telling the truth. He can’t put it past war time spying to send two men at odds to accomplish a mission. Perhaps he was only there to provide Mildmay cover with the traitors, or perhaps Mildmay briefly flirted with the exciting role of double agent.

   Either is within Mildmay’s nature.

   A woman Bill loves that Mildmay breaks him up with complicates things, and even when he finds Mildmay in France the question arises did he really sink the ship and decide to stay in France to fight on, or is he lying and did the Resistance sink the von Blucher? The novel ends with some answers, if Bill can trust them.

   That is the opening line of Run, Mongoose, the second of the Mildmay novels that finds Bill, after a tragic romance, joining Mildmay in Ireland and finding his friend restless and in a dangerous mood (…hero, adventurer by profession, romantic by inclination, pro patria when it suited his own wayward will, but always pro Mildmay.)

   It seems Mildmay has fallen under the spell of wealthy Sir Gabriel Gregorious, a colorful Jamaican millionaire (and precursor to many an Ian Fleming villain) who has hired Mildmay for a scheme involving his bauxite mining interests in Jamaica as well as purchasing a German U-boat and hiring its captain to pilot it to the island, plus there is beautiful Lady Felicity Bantry a sexy and dangerous Irish peer.

   Again Bill finds himself in the role of spy and wondering if Mildmay can be trusted. Which way will the pendulum swing when it comes to treason if the gamble is exciting enough.

   The ending as Mildmay lies seriously wounded and they wonder if help is coming is as close to a confession as Mildmay makes, and Bill finally concludes that “Geoffrey true or Geoffrey false, Geoffrey adventurer or Geoffrey agent, the world would be a poorer place without him. Some gallantry would go, and some gayety — and gallantry and gayety can ill be spared …”

   The final book, The Last Clear Chance takes its title from the legal concept of the last clear chance when a person can be involved in a potential felony and still avoid prosecution. Mildmay is in Washington D.C., supposedly with the British legation, and Bill Stacy is once again drawn into his schemes.

   A traitor lies at the heart of the American government and there is a plot to kidnap an American statesman by the Soviets, just the kind of audacious action a man like Mildmay would find a challenge, and it is not until a dark night on the Chesapeake waiting for a Soviet submarine that Bill Stacy finally knows which side Geoffrey Mildmay will come down on.

   It seems at the end of the book Mildmay has found peace and romantic commitment, but in a rather Bondian moment all he can tell the woman he loves is “For here and now I am with you.”

   One critic called the Mildmay books a mettlesome blend of John Buchan and Evelyn Waugh, and that sums them up well. No few adventure writers followed the War with heroes of dubious nature and motive, including Hammond Innes, Victor Canning, and Geoffrey Household in part a reaction to real events and in part to the patriotic fervor of the War and the complexity of the world it saved.

   The trope goes back to Stevenson and complex good/bad men like Long John Silver, Alan Breck Stewart, and Harry Northmour (“Pavillion on the Links”) and was also a reaction to the pre-war eras uncomplicated popular fiction.

   By the end of the war the more jaded view of Eric Ambler, Graham Greene, and even popular writers like Peter Cheyney, Dennis Wheatley, and soon Ian Fleming had changed the simple clear cut heroics of an earlier period to something darker and more complex.

   Geoffrey Mildmay stands a bit more than halfway between the uncomplicated heroes of John Buchan, Dornford Yates, and H. C. McNeile and Peter Cheyney’s tough agents and James Bond (his final adventure ironically the same year Bond debuted).

   Burke Wilkinson was a busy man who still found time to write well received fiction and history. Among his other positions was Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs and adviser to the Supreme Allied Commander in Europe involved with NATO. He also served two tours in the Navy during the war and was a Commander in the Naval Reserve. His last novel Night of the Short Knives was reprinted in paperback and had good sales and featured an American assigned to SHAEF uncovering a Soviet plot. It was optioned for one of those films that never got made.

   The three Mildmay adventures were reprinted by a small press in 1977 in a thick omnibus edition late in the wake of the Bond craze. I stumbled on my own copy in a Doubleday Book Store in the old Dallas North Park shopping mall and happily forked over my $7.95 for the omnibus. I even recall what I bought with it, three Karl May paperbacks from Bantam Books, Winnetou, Adjistan and Djistan, and In the Desert. Between the four of them it was close onto 2000 pages of adventure.

   That was January 1970, fifty one years ago to the month. (*)

   Days like that are what make book collecting rewarding. You would be hard put today to get half as much for under $20 or recall a week later the transaction.

   ___

(*) Editorial Note: Apologies for the short delay in posting this review!

SCREAM OF FEAR. Columbia Pictures, US, 1961. Originally released as Taste of Fear (Hammer Films, UK, 1961). Susan Strasberg, Ronald Lewis, Ann Todd, Christopher Lee. Writer: Jimmy Sangster. Director: Seth Holt. Currently can be seen on YouTube.

   Penny Appleby (Susan Strasberg) is a beautiful young paraplegic who hasn’t seen her father in almost ten years. Following the suicide of her nurse in Switzerland, she is invited to his estate on the French Riviera, where she meets stepmother Jane (Anne Todd) for the first time. Apparently, Mr Appleby has been called away on business and is not expected back for several days.

   She becomes concerned and, gradually, even suspicious. One night, Penny sees her father’s corpse in the summerhouse, propped in an armchair and staring blankly ahead, but the place is empty upon her return. Jane believes it was a hallucination brought on by grief and that the death of Penny’s nurse is causing unnecessary concern for her father. The family physician, Dr Pierre Gerrard (Christopher Lee), suspects this too and even suggests her paraplegia may be psychosomatic.

   Penny is adamant that she is sane and that her disability, due to a horse-riding accident, is nothing but serious. After seeing her father’s body again, Penny is even more terrified, and finds her only support in the sympathetic chauffeur Bob (Ronald Lewis). They begin to suspect that Anne has murdered her father, or at least may have covered up an accidental death, and that she wants to drive Penny insane in order to seize control of the Appleby estate. The pair investigate, and Penny’s quest to prove her sanity thrusts her into a situation that is dangerously real.

   Hammer Studios may be best known for their horror films, principally involving Dracula and Frankenstein’s Monster shot in lurid Pathecolor, but they had an extensive list of black and white thrillers to their name. Many of these are tremendously gripping – though most, nowadays, are all too easily overlooked.

   Christopher Lee once said that this was the best film Hammer ever made, and that is no surprise. It was certainly scripted by their best writer, Jimmy Sangster, who also serves as producer for the first time. Its success led to further thrillers in a similar vein, most notably the Oliver Reed-starring Paranoiac and The Nanny with Bette Davis, and though Scream of Fear (its US title) doesn’t boast such star names (Christopher Lee’s role is more of a recurring cameo), it doesn’t need any, offering instead strong performances, a relatable protagonist, plenty of atmosphere and a tense, beguiling story that will keep viewers guessing.

   The disabled-person-in-jeopardy angle may be a familiar one, but it serves the picture well, framing Penny as a stoic character, resolutely defiant in the face of easy condescension and the risible assumption that a physical disability may in some way hamper a person’s intellectual faculties. This, needless to say, proves to be the undoing of certain characters, and that third-act twist is like a sock to the jaw. Highly recommended.

Rating: ****

   Around 5:30 A.M. on Saturday, January 9, I lost one of my closest friends in the mystery field. John Lutz was the first writer I met after moving to St. Louis in the early 1970s. At that time, when he was in his early thirties and I in my late twenties, he was known only for his short stories in Ellery Queen, Alfred Hitchcock and other genre magazines. We grew as writers together, our first hardcover novels coming out a year apart.

    Either more prudent or more cowardly than John, I kept my day job. He chose to write full-time, and soon became very well known indeed, perhaps more for the novel that was turned into the movie SINGLE WHITE FEMALE (1992) than for any other book. He continued to write until about two years ago when Parkinson’s and other health issues ended his long career.

   He was a native Texan, born in Dallas on September 11, 1939. When he was four his photographer father moved the family to St. Louis. Soon after the end of World War II the elder Lutz opened a tavern which he continued to own and operate for more than twenty years. John graduated from Southwest High School in 1957 and, having not the foggiest notion what he wanted to do with his life, found a job as a movie theater usher. The following year, at age 19, he married Barbara Jean Bradley, who worked at the same theater. The marriage lasted more than sixty years.

   A young man who becomes a husband and father before he’s old enough to vote, and who has to support the family putting in long hours at low-level jobs, will rarely have the energy to read for enjoyment, let alone to write, during what little free time he has. John Lutz did. In the early 1960s he was working on various night shifts as a civilian switchboard operator for the St. Louis Police Department, a forklift operator, and a warehouseman for a grocery chain.

   By daylight he was reading voraciously — among his favorites at the time were John D. MacDonald, Ross Macdonald, John Collier, Gerald Kersh and Roald Dahl — and pounding out dozens of his own short stories at warp speed, sometimes not even bothering to make a carbon. When or if he slept remains a mystery. “It looked easy,” he said, “so I tried it and found out it wasn’t.”

   None of his stories sold but that, he said after making the grade, was “part of the learning process.” Dozens of rejection slips in a row have aborted countless potential writing careers but John refused to get discouraged. “I saw I could improve, so I kept at it.” After a while the editors who turned down his material began to write supportive comments in their sorry-we-can’t-use-this letters. “That’s a good sign. I’d know I was close to a sale then.”

   Most of his stories were mysteries because he liked to read them and thought they were relatively easy to sell. One frabjous day in early 1966 he opened his mail and out popped a contract. He was still working the night shift at a grocery warehouse when his first story came out. “Thieves’ Honor” (Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, December 1966) opened the door for him, and acceptances soon began pouring in. Six of his tales appeared in 1967, ten in ‘68, five more in ‘69. Within a few years of his unheralded entry into the genre he was being published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, the science-fiction periodical Galaxy, the Diners Club magazine Signature, men’s mags like Knight and Swank and Cavalier.

   But the majority of his stories sold to Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine and many of those are among his finest. In 1975, his tenth year in the field, eighteen new Lutz tales were published including five (under his own name and four pseudonyms) in a single issue of a single magazine. Now that’s productivity!

   Even after 1971 when his first novel was published, John prudently held onto his job as night warehouseman. Eventually he found a better-paying position as a truck driver. In 1973, after being laid off from that job, he decided to take a crack at full-time writing. Two years later he and his wife Barbara and their three children and their dog moved across St. Louis County to a stucco house on a wooded corner lot in suburban Webster Groves, where they lived for the next thirty-odd years.

   There are no series characters in most of his short stories but there are what one might call series elements. The two that are identified with him are husbands seeking a method of wife-disposal and off-the-wall business organizations. Occasionally, like the creator of two different series detectives who has his sleuths work together on a particular case, he used both signature elements in a single story, for example “Fractions” (Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, June 1972), which is about a company that manipulates unwanted spouses into cheating.

   John could create a new business as easily as a rabbit can create another rabbit, but most of his imaginary entities share a common factor. Beneath the impressive facade and the smiles and the handshakes they’re out to take us. He was never all that fond of the self-congratulatory social Darwinism known as the free enterprise system, and even when dealing with businesses that exist in reality he combined a healthy cynicism with imaginative bizarrerie and came up with dandy items like “Mail Order” (Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, April 1975) and “Understanding Electricity” (Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, August 1975), which read as if Kafka had come back from the grave to collaborate with Ralph Nader.

   Not all his stories were of this sort, but the best do tend to stem from wildly distinctive premises, like “The Real Shape of the Coast” (Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, June 1971) with its lunatic detective trying to solve a murder in the asylum, or “Dead Man” (Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, March 1974) where we share the last hours of a tycoon locked inside a walk-in vault with a few hours’ air supply as he gropes desperately for a clue to the identity of his own murderer.

   His first decade as a writer also saw the publication of his first two novels. THE TRUTH OF THE MATTER (1971) is a paperback about a fugitive couple being stalked across the Midwest by the police but mainly by their own lies and self-deceptions and fears. BUYER BEWARE (1976) introduced St. Louis PI Alo Nudger, whose trademark is a nervous stomach and whose specialty is the legal counter-kidnaping of children kidnaped by non-custodial parents.

   Then came four breakthrough books that established him as a writer to contend with. BONEGRINDER (1977) is a bit like JAWS out of water, pitting a rural sheriff against a Bigfoot-like monster terrorizing a small town in the Ozarks. LAZARUS MAN (1979) is a Watergate-era political thriller in which the G. Gordon Liddy figure gets out of prison determined to kill the Nixon figure and his cronies one by one, only to find that they’re just as bent on killing him.

   JERICHO MAN (1980) is the first but far from the last novel in which John mined the Lawrence Sanders vein of urban violence, with a tough NYPD captain and a young architect battling the madman who planted dynamite in the foundations of several high-rises when they were under construction. In THE SHADOW MAN (1981) a U.S. Senator is stalked through the Manhattan nightscape by what seems to be a psychotic political assassin with the power to be in several places at once.

   John never stopped writing short stories even when he was turning out a novel a year, but his magazine appearances became rarer. A few of his tales from this period featured series characters like Nudger or BONEGRINDER’s Sheriff Billy Wintone, and an occasional non-series story furnished raw material for a later novel, like “The Other Runner” (Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, October 1978), the source for one of the scariest of the murders in LAZARUS MAN a year later.

   But stories like “Pure Rotten” (Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, August 1977) and “Dear Dorie” (Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, September 16, 1981) are as crazy as any he dreamed up in his early days, and “High Stakes” (The Saint Mystery Magazine, June 1984) is one of the most terrifying short stories of suspense since the death of Cornell Woolrich.

   The Edgar that Mystery Writers of America awarded him for the Nudger story “Ride the Lightning” (Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, January 1985), was an honor well deserved and long overdue.

   In THE EYE (1984) John and co-author Bill Pronzini revisited Lawrence Sanders country and came up with a powerful noir thriller. A wealthy madman living in a Jersey Palisades highrise keeps his balcony telescope trained on the residents of a single block of Manhattan’s West 98th Street. His name is God, and those who violate his commandments he kills.

   Assigned to the series of West 98th Street murders is plainclothesman E.L. Oxman, a diligent plodder trapped in a cancerous marriage and desperate for affection on almost any terms. When he takes up with the promiscuous young artist who lives on the murder-plagued block, they both unwittingly nominate themselves as God’s next targets.

   Next John revived Alo Nudger but in a somewhat reconfigured version. The character’s ill-advised first name is almost never mentioned, he no longer specializes in the legal kidnaping of children (or anything else), the narration has shifted from first to third person, and the protagonist’s symbiotic relationship with his city has become almost as strong as Spenser’s with Boston or Philip Marlowe’s with L.A.

   The new Nudger comes close to being a total loser, plagued by overdue bills and deadbeat clients and a bloodsucking ex-wife and shoddy consumer goods and that old nervous stomach and most of all by his near-paralyzing unaggressiveness and compassion.

   His office is above a doughnut shop in a dreary suburb of north St. Louis County. He drives a dented old Volkswagen Beetle that he has trouble finding whenever he parks in a shopping center lot and which tends to die on him for lack of maintenance when he uses it to chase or shadow someone.

   He shares the world of Charlie Chaplin’s tramp: whatever can go wrong for him, will. In NIGHTLINES (1984) Nudger encounters a suicidal woman whose life is even more messed up than his own while hunting the slasher who’s been using the phone company’s private equipment-testing lines to make blind dates with his female victims.

   RIDE THE LIGHTNING (1987), expanded from his Edgar-winning short story, puts Nudger in a hopeless race against the clock to save a petty criminal from being electrocuted for one crime he may not have committed. The tenth and final novel in the series was OOPS! (1998) which, I immodestly point out, was dedicated to me.

   One Nudger book a year left John ample time to launch a second private eye series, this one set in central Florida and featuring a character for whom the perfect movie incarnation would have been Robert Duvall. Fred Carver is a balding fortyish ex-cop whose police career ended when he was kneecapped by a Latino street punk. Vegetating in the beachfront bungalow he bought with his disability pay, Carver is pushed into PI work by friends on the force who want him to stop pitying himself and get on with his life.

   In TROPICAL HEAT (1986) Carver is hired by a lovely realtor to find her lover, who in the middle of a solitary continental breakfast on her terrace either walked out on her for no reason, or jumped off a cliff into the ocean, or was pushed off. The search leads to a condominium time-sharing scam, a drug deal (in Florida what else?), an underwater duel with a knife-wielding Marielito, an airboat chase through the Everglades, and an emotional entanglement which neither Carver nor his client is equipped to handle.

   The plot is of the bare-bones variety but the meat on those bones is prime noir, saturated with vivid descriptions of the Florida heat. All the subsequent Carver novels had one-word titles: SCORCHER, KISS, FLAME, BLOODFIRE, HOT, SPARK, TORCH, BURN, and finally LIGHTNING (1996). For me the finest of the lot is KISS (1988), one of the most disturbing and downbeat of all PI novels.

   Interspersed among his PI books are about sixty short stories published in anthologies of original fiction plus several stand-alone thrillers. SWF SEEKS SAME (1990) is a prime specimen of noir contemporaine in which a young woman in New York advertises for someone to share an apartment with and winds up with the roommate from hell.

   This became by far the best known Lutz novel when it was filmed by director Barbet Schroeder as SINGLE WHITE FEMALE (1992), starring Bridget Fonda and Jennifer Jason Leigh.

   His novels of the 21st century are about twice as long as any of his previous books and, beginning with THE NIGHT CALLER (2001), noir fiction’s favorite word was in the titles of the first half-dozen. Later books followed the lead of JERICHO MAN and THE EYE, concentrating on protracted duels between big-city cop Frank Quinn and various sociopaths.

   In their golden years the Lutzes were living in a lovely house in the affluent suburb of Des Peres that was large enough to accommodate frequent visits from children and grandkids. Their winters were spent in Sarasota and they loved to visit New York for a concentrated week or two of theatergoing.

   John continued to write up a storm, filling his pages with the doings of lovers and losers, butchers and victims, fools and clowns, hunters and prey. His final novel was THE HAVANA GAME (2019).

   Over the decades we interacted often. In my second novel, CORRUPT AND ENSNARE (1978), as The Honorable Jon Lutz he was elevated to the rank of justice on a nameless state’s supreme court, and in my short story “The Spark” he became Lon Judson, an author notorious for his stories about husbands killing their wives.

   My fourth novel, THE NINETY MILLION DOLLAR MOUSE (1987), was dedicated to him, and a year later I edited BETTER MOUSETRAPS (1988), his first collection of short stories.

   John and Barb and my late wife Patty and I enjoyed many dinners together at a number of restaurants, of which I most fondly remember the dining room of the Hotel Daniele, right near the line separating St. Louis city from the county seat of Clayton, a restaurant I renamed The Auberge and cannibalized for the fine-dining scene in BENEFICIARIES’ REQUIEM (2000).

   The last time I saw him was in March 2020, shortly before Covid-19 dominated the world. He said nothing, needed a walker to get around, had lost a lot of weight, but he could still function. That soon changed. He deteriorated over the rest of last year and died a little more than a week into this one.

   The only other writers with whom I had such a close and rich relationship were Fred Dannay and Ed Hoch, both of them now long dead. Is it any wonder that as the years pass I feel empty and alone more and more often?

DASHIELL HAMMETT – Red Harvest. The Continental Op. Alfred A. Knopf, hardcover, 1929. Originally serialized in Black Mask, November 1927 to February 1928.

   My favorite of Hammett’s works, and a classic example of the “one-damn-thing-after-another” school of hard-boiled fiction.

   The plot exists merely as a blank canvas to paint vivid scenes and characters upon, but here it is, for what it’s worth. Hammett’s nameless Op is summoned to the city of Personville (called Poisonville by the locals) at the behest of Donald Wilsson, son of the local tyrant, Elihu Wilssson, and editor of the daily paper.

   Young Donald gets himself murdered before the Op ever meets him, but old Elihu engages him to find the killer, then gives him a carte-blanche to clear out the criminal element, who seem to outnumber the ordinary folk by an unhealthy margin.

   And from there on, as I say, it’s just one damn thing after another. Fixed fights, mercenary dames, dynamite, crooked cops, bootleg hooch, gang wars, and the occasional solo murder solved just to give things a rest.

   All this would have crowded up most novels, but in Hammett’s terse, evocative prose, it flows smoothly all the way, livened up by characters who strut and fret their few lines across the page with color and conviction: tough guys with names like Reno Starkey and Whisper Thaler, backed up by sharply delineated supporting players who come and go in less than a paragraph. Hammett didn’t waste any words here, but he didn’t leave any out, either.

   This was the first of Hammett’s Black Mask serials to be published as a novel. Oddly, it is the only one never faithfully adapted to the screen, though it was cited by Akira Kurosawa as the basis for Yojimbo, which inspired A Fistful of Dollars, which inspired the prohibition-set gangster film Last Man Standing, so I guess in a way it came full circle.

SARA PARETSKY “The Case of the Pietro Andromache.” PI V. I. Warshawski. Novelette. First published in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, December 1988. Collected in Windy City Blues (Delacorte, hardcover, 1995). Reprinted in Sisters in Crime, edited by Marilyn Wallace (Berkley, paperback, 1989), and in Women on the Edge, edited by Martin H. Greenberg (Dutton, hardcover, 1992).

   I believe, but I am not positive about this, that this is one of few stories “Vic” Warshawski is in that is not told in first person. She’s brought in only after the fact, after her good friend Lotty has been arrested for killing another doctor in the hospital where she works. They didn’t get along to begin with, but the other man’s death occurred after Lottie had bitterly accused him of theft, that of a valuable sculpture that went missing in Europe during World War II.

   Paretsky’s writing is as smooth as usual, but leaving the story to be told in third person allows Vic to do all of the detective work off stage, only to be revealed later, in a “gather all the suspects together” final scene. Even though there is one solid clue in the form of a piece of dialogue that we, the reader, are privy to, the ending I found to be mystery story light and very disappointing.

BULLDOG DRUMMOND “The Case of the Double Death.” 16 April 1945. Mutual, sustaining. Ned Wever as Bulldog Drummond.

   One of old time radio most famous introductory openings: Echoing footsteps, a foghorn, shots, and several blasts of a police whistle, then: “Out of the fog … out of the night … and into his American adventures … comes … Bulldog Drummond.”

   Other than Drummond himself, the only other recurring character is Denny, Drummond’s aide-de-camp, so to speak, first or last name not known, nor the actor who played him at this time of the run. I have possible names, but it’s been too long since I’ve been a regular OTR listener to hazard a guess.

   It is also not clear, based on this episode only, what official capacity Drummond has in this country, if any. I generally consider him a gentleman adventurer who consistently gets into trouble.

   He’s friends enough with the warden of a nearby penitentiary where a notorious gangster is to be executed, however, to be asked to witness the death, but Denny arrives too late, his hat and umbrella having been stolen while they were eating before hand, then falling asleep on a train while going back and getting another.

   When the two arrive back home together they find a dead man in the living room. Not knowing what else to do before figuring out a plan of action, they return the body to his hotel room, where they set up a trap for the killer with the dead body as bait, and … well, check the title, and a rather complicated story suddenly makes sense. Well, sort of. It’s the kind of story that’s a puzzler all the way through until the end, when, if you start to think about it, why did the killer make it all so complicated?

   It’s still fun to listen to, though.

   The series ran first from 1941 to 1949, then was picked up again for the 1953-54 season, with Cedric Hardwicke in the leading role. It ran first locally on WOR New York, then expanded nationwide to the Mutual network, sometimes with a sponsor, other years only sustaining.

THE LITTLE THINGS. Warner Brothers / HBO Max, 2021. Denzel Washington as Joe “Deke” Deacon, a Kern County Deputy Sheriff, Rami Malek as Jim Baxter, LASD Detective, Jared Leto as Albert Sparma (their top suspect). Written and directed by John Lee Hancock.

   It more or less begins like any other serial killer movie. There’s a girl being chased and a tired lawman whose best days may very well be behind him. In this case, however, the lawman is portrayed by Denzel Washington. You know you’re going to – at the very least – get to witness a solid acting performance.

   And for the first hour or so, that’s about all The Little Things has to offer. There’s very little new under the dark sun. Washington portrays Kern County Deputy Sheriff by the name of Joe “Deke” Deacon. Formerly an LASD homicide investigator, he has downsized to a slower, more rural part of California. All that changes when he’s asked to retrieve some evidence from his former employer. While there, he encounters Jim Baxter (Rami Malek), a younger and cockier version of his former self.

   The two don’t exactly get along, but they see something in each other. Before you know it, Deke and Baxter are unofficially working together to solve a series of murders. Deke happens to believe that this recent rash of killings of young women is somehow connected to the murders of prostitutes he failed to solve five years ago.

   Deke is seemingly mentally tortured by the ghost of a victim he failed to save and appears to be just a little too eager to connect the past with the present. It’s the standard stuff of serial killer movies. An obsessed detective, one who even goes so far as to pin photographs of victims on his bedroom wall.

   Expectations are subverted when Deke focuses on a prime suspect, a greasy, sleazy repairman who lives alone in a shoddy Hollywood apartment. The problem is that there is really nothing tying Albert Sparma (Jared Leto) to the crime other than the guy is weird – really weird – and seems to know a lot about the case. Maybe he’s the killer or maybe he’s just a disgustingly odd man with a true crime fascination.

   Without giving anything away, let’s just say that the second half of the movie, in which Deke and Baxter play a cat-and-mouse game with Sparma is far superior to the first hour. And, at some point, things change. And everything you thought you knew about Deke gets upended. No. He’s not the serial killer – this film doesn’t go for that level of cheapness – but he does have secrets he aims to guard at all costs.

   Although the movie isn’t nearly as clever as it purports to be, it’s nevertheless a decent thriller largely kept afloat by its stellar cast and stark, haunting cinematography. Set in the 1990s, the movie also benefits from good set design and an unmistakable sense of place. I happen to enjoy watching detective movies in which not everyone has a cell phone. Somehow adds to the allure and the mystery and danger of it all. Unless there is a call box or a pay phone, how are you going to call for help?

GREGORY MCDONALD – Skylar. Skyler Whitfield #1. William Morrow & Co., hardcover, 1995. Avon, paperback, 1997.

   I’m one of the relatively few people who never was particularly fond of the “Fletch” books, though I thought a later one, Son of Fletch, was pretty good. Mcdonald’s writing always struck me as okay, even better than that sometimes; I just didn’t care much for “Fletch.” Mcdonald thought he was a whole lot cuter than I did.

   Skylar Whitfield is a young man who seems determined to underachieve. His placid existence is disrupted one summer when a northern cousin who is the paragon of every virtue Skylar seems to lack comes to visit, and then a young lady widely regarded as Skylar’s is brutally murdered. Not everybody believes Skylar did it, but the law does, and he has to prove he didn’t by finding out who did.

   If that doesn’t sound like much of a plot to hang a novel on, well, it isn’t. I swear, sometimes it seems to me that there’s not a writer new or old (and by implication not an editor, either) who gives the slightest damn about plot credibility, Come up with a cute character, write some readable prose, and to hell with whether it all makes sense or not – and that exactly describes Skylar. The character is reasonably interesting if a bit superficially done, Mcdonald does his usual decent brand of prose, and the plot is absolutely, totally, unequivocally stupid.

   Unbelievable. In-fucking-credible. I’ve always been a character – rather than a plot-driven reader, but Jesus, there are limits. Well, there are with me, anyway; evidently there aren’t with a lot of people. Pass this gobbler up.

Bibliographic Update: There was but one additional entry in the series, that being Skylar in Yankeeland (1997)

BULLDOG DRUMMOND AT BAY. Columbia Pictures, 1947. Ron Randell, Anita Louise, Patrick O’Moore, Terry Kilburn, Lester Matthews, Holmes Herbert, Leonard Mudie. Screenplay by Frank Gruber from the novel by H. C. “Sapper” McNeile. Directed by Sidney Salkow.

   Whatever might be said of the novels and five short stories about Captain Hugh “Bulldog” Drummond written by retired Major Herman Cyril McNeile, who began his career writing critically acclaimed short fiction about the First World War, it is hard to deny Drummond had a fairly good and remarkably long film career from his first appearance in 1919, finally bowing out after a last appearance during the sixties spy craze.

   Along the way there was a long running radio series, with a memorable opening, “Out of the fog, out of the night …”, a hit play, two movie parodies, and outings in the American pulps, the Strand Magazine, song, and even comics. Drummond even made it into a Warner Brothers cartoon, albeit as an actual bulldog.

   We won’t even go into the influence on writers like Leslie Charteris and the Saint, John Creasey and Department Z, Patrick Dawlish, and Bruce Murdoch, Berkeley Gray and Norman Conquest, Mickey Spillane and Mike Hammer, Ian Fleming and James Bond, and Clive Cussler and Dirk Pitt save to note the film Drummond was certainly as much of an influence as the literary version on later writers. An entire school of Drummond imitators exist in British thriller fiction.

   Over the years on-screen Drummond was played by a variety of actors including twice by Ronald Colman who received an Oscar nomination for his first outing in 1929’s Bulldog Drummond (ironically losing to Warner Baxter playing the Cisco Kid in In Old Arizona), Rod La Roque (in a silent American film based on the book but basically ignoring it), Ralph Richardson, Ray Milland, Tom Conway, Walter Pidgeon, and Richard Johnson.

   In 1947 Australian actor Ron Randell (who was also the Lone Wolf on screen for a while) picked up the reins dropped by the John Howard Paramount Drummond series of the thirties in a remake of 1937’s Bulldog Drummond at Bay with John Lodge.

   Unlike the Lodge film, which had splendid villainy by American Victor Jory, this version, scripted by Frank Gruber (who among other things wrote the splendid screenplay for A Mask for Dimitrios), actually resembles the book it is based on, finding Drummond down in the Fen country, planning to assassinate some ducks after retiring from the army, when a stone thrown through his window in the middle of the night plunges him into adventure.

   No sooner does Drummond step outside to look about than two men in a car pull up and one (Lester Matthews) pulls a gun on him. Drummond plays dumb and they depart after a quick search, but driving away they spot what they were looking for, the man who threw the rock through Drummond’s window.

   The next morning Doris Meredith (Anita Louise) shows up with convenient car trouble and tries to drug Drummond so she can search for the message tied to the rock when he serves her tea. Curiouser and curiouser as Alice observed. Doris claims she needs Drummond’s help and that her brother is in trouble.

   At this point Drummond calls his old friend Inspector McIver (Holmes Herbert) and enlists a local would be reporter (Terry Kilburn) and his old pal Algy Longworth (Pat O’Moore billed as Patrick here).

   When Drummond’s hunting dog is killed and his housekeeper drugged while he is recruiting Algy things start picking up, then Drummond captures one of the men watching his house, who is murdered before he can talk shortly after an angry McIver arrives explaining one of his under cover men, Richard Hamilton, is missing.

   Does Hamilton have a sister? Maybe, maybe not.

   From there on the whole thing moves at a clip to a satisfying conclusion.

   Unfortunately they leave out the chief villain of the book, none other than Carl Peterson’s murderous inamorata Irma Peterson.

   As far as I know this is only available as part of a pricey set of Drummond DVD’s including all the Drummond films extant in two volumes (most, including the Conway films are easily found on YouTube and elsewhere). Picture quality is poor, but watchable and there are a few weak spots with the sound, but it and the second and final Randell film Bulldog Drummond Strikes Back are both fairly good B-programmers, largely because Randell is much closer to the Drummond of the books than most of the actors cast in the role with broad shoulders and a barrel chest.

   Whatever his limits as an actor he had easy charm on screen, a fine voice, looked good in action, and was more than capable of carrying this sort of thing effortlessly (which I rate has a fairly high level of skill, every actor doesn’t have to play Lear). Tom Conway would follow in two Drummond outings with One Step Beyond host John Newland as Algy a year later, then in 1951 Walter Pidgeon would step out in a major Drummond film, Calling Bulldog Drummond, based on the book by the McNeile’s successor and the model for Drummond, Gerard Fairlie and starring sexy voiced Margaret Leighton, Bernard Lee (M from the Bond films), and future Drummond (in a television pilot) Robert Beatty. After that Drummond was pretty much silent until 1967 and 1969’s Deadlier Than the Male (*) and Some Girls Do with Richard Johnson.

   There have been a couple of attempts at updating Drummond in recent years by various writers including one series imagining him as a modern retired SAS type. None of them have really caught on. A little over a century since he debuted taking out a classified ad looking for adventure Drummond seems relegated to nostalgia, but who knows. In popular fiction anything can happen.

   (*) The novelization of that one by Henry Reymond is supposedly by none other than master mystery writer H. R. F. Keating, though from reading the second book also by “Reymond” seems unlikely to be Keating.